Meaningful Decker Abilities
Let's discuss what is/could be possible

can deckers get literally any kind of meaningful abilities. it's a stagnant archetype that can do maybe two useful things that, shocker, nobody gives a fuck about. it is honestly baffling that the "this archetype is lacking in features and not recommended" warning was taken off on the archetypes page. it feels like originally they were intended to do more, but nobody ever got around to actually implementing the features that would let them

i understand staff and coders and such are busy and have lives outside of the game of course but it's more than a little disheartening to see so many new things being added to the game and then deckers get like a new greeble to play with on the grid forums if they're lucky. it feels like you're just entirely opposed to deckers having any kind of influence over anything at all. literally all they can do are party tricks (that require three skills to do, ensuring they cant do anything else well either). i look forward to the same three people that have never played a decker in their lives coming in to tell me how im wrong about all of this or "just roll a solo lol" too

(Edited by Baguette at 2:24 pm on 10/8/2026)

…when? all im seeing is a fix to prevent people from aborting program execution to get around accumulating grid heat

if you're referring to grid 4 itself, while it is a huge update, it's one that doesn't really give deckers any kind of meaningful abilities. they can do the same shit as always, just now they can also i guess turn off a camera for a few minutes or pull a list of no-value data from an employment terminal or something

(Edited by Rillem at 2:44 pm on 10/8/2026)

Seriously though, I can't get IC here and you know that. But it really does sound like the role just ain't fit for what you have in mind. Again, I have both seen and personally used data from the things you can scan. Deckers are WAAAAY more prevalent than they were when I first started back in 2015, and the shit they can do is unique to them. I understand that I am not PLAYING a decker, but I have RP'ed along side them, and I never get this sentiment from the other deckers.

(Edited by Baguette at 3:07 pm on 10/8/2026)

If you want to be able to do more stuff with your existing character then get a skillsoft and slot some cool softs. With what money, I hear you asking? Hustle up. Mug people. Take out a loan. The money is there to take if you can.

If you are so fed up with deckers and the fact that they get shitstomped by combat characters I highly suggest a re-roll. Not even to make a solo, just make a new character that has something fun to do beyond decking. It clearly isn't fun for you as a player, separately from the game itself.

Make a thief. Make a corpie villain. Make a mixer villain. Make a medic with a heart of gold but a dark secret. Make a drunken brawling fool with a death wish. Make literally any character you want that isn't tied down to this current one dialed in with a specific skillset that you are so clearly unsatisfied with.

Make a new character and have fun with it! It's a game after all, you should be having fun!

also lol @ all those suggested archetypes to reroll as just being "combat character" or "guy paying combat character". yeah thats the whole game boiled down to its bare essentials really

why would i keep making suggestions when every time i have, the same three or four guys kramer into the thread to tell me how Actually It's Fine That Deckers Can't Do Anything and nothing at all happens

Make a thief (non combat). Make a corpie villain (non combat). Make a mixer villain (prob combat focused). Make a medic with a heart of gold but a dark secret (non combat). Make a drunken brawling fool with a death wish (hey, you could focus on something other than combat, the char has a death wish!)

i think the whole reaction is so over the top that it makes it hard to take all that seriously, no offense, and I know you're being baited for reaction but at some point you gotta stop taking the bait.

I also think scanning should be tied skill, and the higher skill the less noticeable you are doing it. Keep it available for laymen to do at base, but let novahot deckers be able to scan things in an area or on people without them realizing. Now, you might say, 'But that's too strong! How will I defend my progia and my term!?' Easy. You hire a decker to install ICE. Then the enemy decker has to crack it first, which is more overt, and now you have a conflict ecosystem.

(Edited by svetlana at 6:31 pm on 10/8/2026)

I don't even think deckers need remotely comparable combat power, they just need comparable agency. A solo's skill investment allows them to proactively create problems, be it attacking someone, protecting someone, intimidating someone, collecting bounties, whatever violent scenario you can imagine. A thief can steal, a fixer can trade and build networks. A decker shouldn't have to wait for the planets to align so that their 12-hour camera script becomes relevant.

I think it'd be kinder to just not have these skills available at all rather than turning them into what Munitions used to be and leading people on into pretending that they actually do anything.

1. need to give changes time to percolate
2. to give attention to the rest of the game

Threads like this kinda just piss me off. You seem unhappy that you aren't able to do more. Okay, I can understand that. At the same time, you've misrepresented what is possible, as many people in this thread have pointed out. You can actually do quite a lot as a decker. A lot of it isn't permanent which is purposeful for all the reasons I've laid out in other posts.

I mean, deckers can:
- mark fines from the WJF as paid
- fuck with the mag levs
- play TV shows on a specific channel
- make programs
- hack nodes
- hack daemons
- hack security cameras
- slice people into the ACL for nodes
- slice people into the guest list for non player run businesses/mag levs
- turn off security cameras
- get paydata from employment terms
- identify if someone is in an area by their sic
- blank out the SIC id on a grid account
- hack into many different objects in game including other decks and get pay data
- create deadmans switch type setups
- create daemons to monitor grid/security gear/nodes
- search node content in a way non deckers cant

And they can do all of this for free, excluding the cost of their deck.

Saying they can't do literally anything is silly, wrong, and counter productive. And your frustration that you can't do more and the way you've expressed it isn't making me want to put more of my time into making the Grid better.

Limit your expectations to what the game offers when you play a Decker, and get creative. If you come in here with the attitude of 'I cant be like a Sprawl or a Cyberpunk 2077 runner, so i'm useless!!!' Then you just make SinDome deckers looks bad.

You're right that I was quite frustrated when I first made the thread, and should probably have taken some time to cool off first, so I apologize for that. However, while I do appreciate all the new things deckers are able to do, it's like people have said earlier in the thread. Grid 4 is ocean wide and puddle deep. You have all these theoretically really cool things you can do, but in practice opportunities to use them almost never come up.

You can hack cameras. Cool. I am yet to encounter any scenario where anyone cares about that, because they can just throw on a poncho and nobody's the wiser.

You can pull data from employment terminals. Awesome. On paper, this is a really exciting and cool idea. But when you actually go out to do that, you have to get past physical security (guards, locked doors, potentially retina scanners, who knows what else), and then when you actually manage to hack the thing the only 'paydata' you can pull off it is not anywhere close to worth the effort in any way. You can piece it together yourself by looking at people's SIC tags and the publicly-accessible job board, and I'm also yet to see any scenario where anyone cares how much a certain person is getting paid.

You can hack other decks, and these do actually have somewhat useable data on them. But to actually get a scan on a deck in the first place, you need to either manage to get your hands on someone's deck by lifting it off their person, scanning it, and planting it back on them (they are guaranteed to notice this unless you manage to pull off some real Ocean's 11 bullshit, which almost makes it not worth it) or getting a backtrace on them with a daemon (the threshold for doing this is far too high and I don't think anyone in the game has ever had a daemon successfully backtrace anything, meaning the only way anyone gets a terminal scan is through Grid Heat thresholds).

The rest of what you've listed, while still cool and things I'm grateful for, don't really have too much utility, especially node stuff that can be reverted in a matter of seconds. And when they *do* have utility in theory, the situations where they would actually be of any use functionally do not happen.

That is my main problem with decking as it currently exists. There is so many THEORETICALLY awesome things you can pull off, but when you actually try to put them into practice it just falls flat on its face. I understand and appreciate that a lot of time and work went into developing Grid 4, but I really strongly feel that things need to be at least reworked in some way if you want playing a decker to feel any kind of rewarding.